The present invention relates generally to methods for managing videos, and more particularly to methods for building a taxonomy of topics and categorizing videos based on a taxonomy of topics.
Videos, in varied forms, e.g., TV programs and movies, continue to be a popular method to provide and obtain information and entertainment. This is evident in the continual increase in the number of professional and home videos produced every year. For example, historical archives of TV program metadata from Tribune Media Services (TMS) indicate that there has been a hundred-fold increase in the number of programs broadcast over the last 50 years: roughly about 1000 programs were broadcast 50 years back, while almost 100,000 programs were broadcast in 2007. Even a larger volume of videos is provided over the Internet as users create and share their videos through online sites, such as, YouTube, Flickr, and others.
This explosive growth of videos has occurred without much structure or organization. As a result, a significant amount of content, relevant and useful to users, goes unnoticed. Coming up with one big static directory of topics to organize such content is not an easy task since the topics of the content could vary widely. Moreover, the relevancy of concepts or sub-topics related to a topic may change over time. For example, in the topic of basketball, Michael Jordan probably is not as an important sub-topic as it once was when he played for the Chicago Bulls in early 1990's. In addition to the dynamic nature of the concept's relevancy to a topic, different users typically have different preferences and may prefer to organize video contents differently.
In light of the above, there is a need for techniques for building a taxonomy of topics and categorizing videos based on the taxonomy of topics. It is further desirable that the taxonomy of topics be personalized to each user for increased relevancy and be built automatically at certain intervals using dynamic sources, e.g., Web sources, to maintain its relevancy over time.